Abstract

Peoples speaking languages of the Bantu family are widespread in sub‐Saharan Africa, from the equatorial rainforest to the
Cape of Good Hope. Their present‐day distribution is the result of a remarkable expansion, which started about 4000–5000 years
ago in the borderland between Cameroon and Nigeria. The genetic distances among Bantu‐speaking populations are significantly
lower than those between the Bantu and other ethnolinguistic groups from Africa, suggesting an actual movement of people,
rather than cultural diffusion. However, this genetic homogeneity places a challenge to the reconstruction of their actual
routes of dispersal, with existing hypotheses being mainly based on data from linguistics and archaeology. While the indigenous
populations they encountered did not provide a major contribution to the Bantu gene pool at large, admixture studies reveal
different patterns of social interaction, which range from Bantu dominance in the rainforest to a more levelled exchange in
southern Africa.

Key Concepts

The spread of the Bantu languages corresponds to a migratory movement, rather than to cultural diffusion.

The Bantu migrations correlate with the appearance of technological innovations and new subsistence strategies in western
Central Africa.

The range of sampled populations and the resolution of the genetic analyses need to be increased to further explore the genetic
relationships among different Bantu groups and infer the dispersal models that best explain them.

The best documented cases of admixture between Bantu and non‐Bantu populations are provided by studies that were undertaken
in the Central African rainforest and the southern African Kalahari basin.

Figure 1. Distribution of non‐Bantu Niger–Congo (yellow), West Bantu (Orange) and East Bantu (red) languages. Language groups were assigned
according to the affiliation of the most widely distributed languages in the respective countries. The star indicates the
approximate origin of the Bantu expansion.

Figure 2. Geographical distribution of the genetic component associated with Niger–Congo‐speaking groups. The darker the tone is, the
higher is the frequency of the genetic component (see scale). Lighter coloured regions include a comparatively high number
of non‐Niger–Congo‐speaking populations. The map was drawn using data from Tishkoff et al.2009.

Figure 3. Models of Bantu dispersal. (a) Early split; (b) Late split. Based on information from maps published in Pakendorf et al.2011; Russell et al.2014, and Grollemund et al.2015.

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